


all of our fear and the fire

by philthestone



Category: Outlander (TV)
Genre: F/M, Season 1-2 Timeline, anyway. thats pretty much the vibe, probably helped their wives get dressed in the morning, the LAYERS!!!! they require many hands!!, their s 1-2 arc makes me emotional like p much nothing else, theres that one post on tumblr that brings up the fact that historical dudes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-17
Updated: 2020-09-17
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:00:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26506333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/philthestone/pseuds/philthestone
Summary: His laughter is warm and toothy against the still-bare skin of her shoulder. It sounds mirthful -- secret-like. Just theirs. His elbows bracket her waist and he is warm and solid and careful around her, and the tug comes back, deep in her throat this time. She reaches around and presses her hands carefully over his fingers, to start the fumbling, half-hearted process of untangling them.Claire falls in love -- slow and fast at once, perhaps not quite within time at all.
Relationships: Claire Beauchamp/Jamie Fraser
Comments: 28
Kudos: 124





	all of our fear and the fire

**Author's Note:**

> i had some feelings, here we are, the usual. in a historic turn of events this is the first non-au fic ive written for this show, but rest assured, at some later point in this timeline, i am imagining an alternate universe of events.  
> mostly this is inspired by that deleted scene from s2 where claire is detangling jamies hair w the 18th century denman brush equivalent. ie, a comb
> 
> mild content warning for discussion of menstruation in the 2nd scene, and /very/ indirect allusions to their s1-2a arc trauma in the third scene. its rated G v consciously, dont worry
> 
> title is from hozier's wasteland baby (yes, i know) and reviews are beloved

I.

The realization sneaks with padded feet into her consciousness. Claire holds aloft the lopsided boning of her stays, lacing at the back today, and eyes the heavy-draped skirts on the chaise.

“Jamie,” she starts. He is across from her, perched against the bed, having a routine tug-of-war with his left boot. The pale morning-light filtering into their rooms makes his hair look especially bright. At her loaded utterance, he looks up with boyish anticipation and then offers her a grin entirely too knowing and confident for her hesitation. 

“Here -- show me how ye put it on.”

Leoch had maids _before_ , and on the road she’d made do somehow, but now that they are back and she is fighting a losing battle with herself and it is just the two of them in _their room_ the daunting task of assembling this time’s clothes upon her person seems too-vulnerable to take on alone. 

How? She is sure he would not mind her fumbling fingers.

She refuses to give credence to the pleading tug in her voice when she said his name. His hands are sure enough as they take the corset from her, and help her slip her arms through. 

“Lift yer arm, just up there.”

“It laces crosswise.”

“Aye.”

She leans her weight over to her other leg and feels the shoulder of her shift slip down. She pulls it back up. His concentration is an incarnate, palpable thing, felt behind her; Jamie is not the sort who sticks his tongue out when focusing, but his nose does scrunch a bit, she has come to learn. She feels every day like she makes a new friend in some odd detail or idiosyncrasy, given to her freely to tuck away someplace in her heart. He is learning too -- both the intricacies of women’s clothing and _her_ \-- she knows now, and he takes on the challenge of it with an eagerness that suggests it’s more a joy. 

Claire does not think about this too closely, lest her lungs collapse in on themselves and she allow herself the tears she hasn’t yet shed. 

She inhales, then exhales, testing the mettle of his handiwork (just barely too loose). They stand in slightly awkward silence. It’s comfortable, and companionable, but awkward nonetheless: her arm is in the way; then the bumroll; then she bends to pick up an underskirt and one of the laces tugs, and Jamie says, 

“Wait wait -- dinna move, I lost the wee end of the ribbon.”

“Oh -- I think I’ve put this on backwards.”

“Aye -- let it go, so I can get this -- under? It goes under.”

“No, that goes -- around, here --”

“Right, I see. A’right -- turn, jest there --”

“Here?”

“No -- wait, hold still first. Take -- take this piece --”

“Alright.”

“An’ then --”

“The other one?”

He makes an odd noise, unlike him; almost like a bleating sheep. 

“Ah,” he says. “Hm.”

“What,” says Claire.

“It’s no’ any -- ah, weel, if ye could just --”

“What?”

“Nothin’! Nothing, ‘tis fine, I --”

She tries to move again, but is held firmly in place by another blunted tug, and a dismayed noise from behind her. There is a feeling at the back of her yet-to-be pinned hair, somewhere within its cloud, like someone’s forehead has fallen forward into it.

Her own arms are stuck halfway into the depths of an overskirt. Claire stands, frozen stupidly for a second, then emits what she is sure are the unbidden beginnings of a hysteric giggle. 

When she turns to look at him this time it is only a craning of her neck. The tips of his ears are aggressively pink. Jamie’s clever fingers, just slightly too unpracticed, are thoroughly, inescapably knotted into the middle row of her half-tangled laces.

“Will ye jest stand _still_ , ye ridiculous woman --”

“I will _not_ ,” she manages, with a lofty silliness she doesn’t think they’ve yet shared. And then -- she falls to pieces, gasping for air through her foolish giggling. He stands staring at her trussed up and bewildered for only a moment before following her lead. 

His laughter is warm and toothy against the still-bare skin of her shoulder. It sounds mirthful -- secret-like. Just theirs. His elbows bracket her waist and he is warm and solid and careful around her, and the tug comes back, deep in her throat this time. She reaches around and presses her hands carefully over his fingers, to start the fumbling, half-hearted process of untangling them.

II.

She has to admit there is something satisfying about seeing the blood leach out and swirl away in the cold trickle of the river, happily more willing to loosen its hold on her shift under this newly tripled force of scrubbing; Jamie’s hands are so much bigger than her own. Claire holds the vinegar like one might a particularly fragile porcelain heirloom and sits on her knees beside him, observing the proceedings with an abstract anxiousness. She wills her shoulders to remain upright. 

Jamie holds up the bottom hem to inspect in the sunlight. He’s waiting for her judgment -- she can tell because his eyes flick to hers, and his mouth ticks upwards in a sweet sort of question, and she says,

“You’d make a very astute laundress.”

He laughs, warm and for her, wrings it one last time, then shakes it out with careful movements and lays it along the top of the grass, behind them so that it might avoid catching mud. Then he takes her shoulders gently in his hands and pulls her down on top of him, where he’s lying back with spread-eagled limbs beside the riverbank.

Claire’s eyes trace the sodden hem of her drying shift over the curve of his arm, stretched against the grass. It’s not quite stained any longer -- just a shade _off_. 

“Ye ken, I dinna think I’d like tae be a woman,” Jamie says, into the blue sky above, sounding both grave philosopher and wide-eyed schoolboy at once. She traces two fingers along the topmost button of his vest. The ridges are hard and burnished under her nails.

“It’s not so bad,” she says.

“I dinna ken about that, Sassenach. Between this, an’ -- an’ child bearin’, of course. An’ then there are so many out there who’d do ye harm. No’ many lasses who have a trade, like healin’ an’ such like.” He looks down at her over the sharp bridge of his nose, disarmingly troubled. “I s’pose I havenae thought much about it ‘til now.”

“Haven’t you,” she murmurs. But it’s without any real bite. 

It’s early enough in the morning that the rest of the household is surely only just getting up, and late enough in the year that it’s not too cold to be lying in damp grass just shy of dawn. Jamie moves his arms and legs a bit, loose and absent, the way she’s seen young children do in winter. She tries to square this with her _knowing_ of him as a young man sharp and canny and purposeful in everything he does. But it is summer now. And they are in a place he calls _home_.

“No,” he says, with a sort of soft honesty. Her hand curls into a fist against his chest. 

“Thank you.” 

The words are cottoned in her mouth and feel somewhat stupid. Jamie only looks at her.

“Ye could barely move this mornin’, Claire.”

She awoke _this morning_ to the blooming stain between her legs and the mortifying realization that she did not yet want Jenny or Mrs. Crook to be privy to the soaking mockery of her courses. The river was an ideal and practical solution, and not one she was unfamiliar with. She had gotten to her feet and stumbled toward the door, bundled sheets in hand, barely-clothed, and disoriented in a way she had not felt in a while, and Jamie had been woken up by her clumsy movements. Vaguely, she remembers he had seen the dirtied clothes, and listened carefully to her garbled, incoherent explanations, and not asked questions. The warm press of his hand against the small of her back had stymied any potential spillage of routine, overwhelmed tears. 

She doesn’t acknowledge his gentle reproach, nor its unspoken _of course_ , because by now that _of course_ is thoroughly understood in a way that makes her throat close. He is so good about communicating it to her. She has said _I love you_ but once and already feels the ends of it spilling out of her constantly, does not know where or how to direct it. She’s trying to learn.

Jamie is so good at loving, she thinks. 

She continues her attempts to allow her body to be fused into his, a deadweight against him. 

“Sassenach?”

“Mmm.”

“Is it -- always so bad?” At her curious look, he adds, “I dinna think ye’ve had them, ‘til now I mean. I mean -- ye know. Since we’ve been wed. Jenny wouldnae talk about it when we were bairns and I didna think it’d pain ye so.”

He speaks quickly, like she’s come to learn he does when nervous. She processes the question in staggered parts.

“Oh.” Her words are dry where her mouth moves against his clothed chest. They will have to get up soon, and attend to the day’s work. “I -- no. It hasn’t been this heavy in a while.”

His head tilts over, cheek nestling against the dewy grass, to peer at her more properly. She can see the knitting of his brows even at the odd angle. He opens his mouth and she blurts out,

“I think -- sometimes, when I’m. When I’m in a new place, or a dangerous situation, my body makes it stop. It happened when I was younger, and -- and during the War. And then it comes back twice as badly.”

A bird has started twittering, somewhere back down the cobbled path to Lallybroch.

“When ye feel safe again, ye mean,” he says, quietly, after a long moment. His hand has found the small of her back again, leaking warmth through the layers of clothing. 

“Yes,” Claire says. And again, “yes, that’s exactly it.”

III.

She is taking care to go left-to-right, like she has seen him do.

“It isnae so bad as all that,” he’s saying. She does not believe him -- or perhaps she does, but chooses to override the belief with a sedimented need to _care for_ \-- and she dithers in deciding how to respond. Three beats pass. Enough time that in essence, she does not. “I told ye ‘tis only the middle finger that’s a bit stiff.”

“Stop moving your jaw,” she says. She dips the blade into the basin of water between them and _swishes_ , a cursory, practiced movement. Then she says, “It’s the cold. It won’t be as bad when it’s properly summer.” She pauses. “It may be worse in winter.”

“Aye. Like Ian’s leg, I suppose.”

“Mmm.” 

She did this in Paris. There was a time, at first, when she did not, and then there was a time, after, that she _did_. There is a dimensionless void that is the months missing in between. Now she is doing it again.

Before -- _Before_ \-- she did this with Frank. It is not the same thing.

“Tell me what ye’ll be doin’ today,” Jamie says, in a mumble considerate of her brusque directive. 

_Today_. She rolls the word over in her head a moment as she drags the straight edge of the razor carefully around the mole under his cheekbone. _Today_. She is feeling particularly bird-like, today. As though one small twist of someone’s fist will break the fragile bones holding her heart in her chest. 

“Hmmm. One of Fergus’s shirts needs mending. Then of course, Jenny needs help grinding flour for the bannocks. And I’m going to harvest some of our primroses,” she says. “You know, the ones that grow behind the wall?”

“By yer garden,” he agrees, softened with the quietude of their morning. “Ye did say they’d come out by July.”

“Well, July is taking its stubborn Scottish time, but I do believe the roses might have made it.” She tucks away her smile at the sight of his lifting cheeks, warmed and sweetened by her chatter. She knows she is taking too long with each pass of the blade, but she doesn’t really seem to have control over her arms. His skin is warm to the touch. “I think I’ll pluck the buds, then de-petal them. Little Maggie wants to help me --”

“Och, the _woses, Auntie Claire_ \--”

“Stop _talking_ and _yes_ , the _woses_ , which we can use for rosewater and soaps and some tinctures, I think.”

Jamie’s laugh is a quiet murmur, very different from his affectionate imitation of two-year-old Maggie’s bubbly baby voice. “Tired of havin’ yer husband smell of the stables?”

“Oh, I quite like eau de horse, actually.”

His hand -- the one deemed too-sore to attend to shaving, with Claire’s slowly-fading surgical fingerprint webbing over the knuckles -- slips around to press over the outside of her leg, then against her ribcage, then around her back. It stops somewhere in the vicinity of her diaphragm, hovering playfully.

“Ye ken ye always smell bonny, Sassenach. Like yer wee herbs.” 

He inhales just slightly as her wrist twists just the wrong way and catches a dot of blood. The searching fingers twitch. Claire frowns.

“I told you to stop _moving_ ,” she says. 

“My mouth or my hands?”

She knows she should be prepared with an easy rejoinder. Instead, she stands motionless and stares at him a bit uselessly, the razor dripping dirty water onto the floor of their Laird’s bedroom, at a loss for what to say next that is not the verbal equivalent of taking a part of him into her bone marrow.

Or something. Her own cognizance of the impulse is fairly limited, just then, nipped off at its ends. Not unlike the rosebuds.

“Claire,” he says, very quietly, like he has caught her.

She remembers when they were in Paris, she would choose to do this for him despite the presence of servants and attendants and personal groomers. She remembers coming to know the frightening force of the feeling in her chest as she did it -- like a fusing of iron, the throbbing, sudden viscerality with which she wanted to _hurt_ another person for the hurt they had inflicted on him. It went against all of her instincts. She had no knowledge of that kind of feeling, before. It existed separately, unequivocally, from her own anxieties and aloneness, like a live thing in her chest.

“I -- don’t know,” she says now. The fair scruff that covered his jawline is dusting the front of her skirt with a faint freckling of reddish gold.

She misses him, she realizes. She _has_ him again, but there is the lingering pulse of an old feeling not articulated. She misses more than him -- but that is something he knows, because it is as part of him as it is her. Another new thing she’d learned -- that some griefs encompass others so very completely.

Jamie is looking at her searchingly. He says, after a moment, “Yer a selfless woman, Claire.”

Her fingers curl more tightly around the handle of the razor. 

“I don’t think I am,” she whispers. But she thinks he understands. His hands slip down and anchor themselves on either side of her waist. They hold her in place -- knowledgeable of her weightless, bird-like feeling _today_ \-- as she finishes the rest of his jaw, then around his mouth. She works in small, method strokes that are no less soft for it. When she is finished she traces the very tips of her fingers over the patchy spots, and collects the lone, welling droplet of blood she left behind. 

She will ask him to help her sort through the rose petals later, she thinks, and they will sit in the courtyard and try to talk of heart-held dreams once more. 

IV.

She had taken up the comb while he and Murtagh were still talking, more for something to do than anything else, and thinks now that the movement to situate herself at his side and set to task was such an instinctive thing that she could not imagine it separate from herself. She is halfway through a particularly tangled snarl, the wooden tooth of the comb carefully angled, when Murtagh bids them goodnight.

“Maybe tomorrow these clotheids’ll finally make a blasted decision, so we’ll ken whether we’ll be livin’ t’see this year’s planting or no’.”

“ _Bí cúramach_ , _a_ _ghoistidh_.” 

His voice is hoarse and tired. Claire is sure hers is as well. Murtagh sighs, then leaves with a final, complicated look and the gentle placement of a spare blanket at the foot of the bed. She realizes she can’t remember if he had one to spare at all. She focuses again on the snarl.

Jamie does not say anything for a long moment, then shifts a bit under her touch, restless. She’s tilted his head a few times already, methodic in her detangling work, making sure to start from the tips of his hair and work upwards. He goes easily, with a relaxed compliance that compliments her earlier instinct. 

“D’ye think we can do it, Claire?”

Earlier, when they’d first shuffled up to their billeted room ( _Spartan, wood-walled, less cold than outside_ ), Jamie had taken but two steps in before sinking into the too-small chair in the corner. He had looked suddenly, punishingly, uncharacteristically exhausted. 

It had been pouring rain outside -- an abhorrent, unrelenting thing.

She doesn’t have to ask what he means. The comb in her hand moves in quick, practiced strokes: slip a wooden tooth under one knotted curl from base upwards, careful to work around the angriest snarls with smaller movements. The fingers of his right hand are tapping their customary rhythm against his thigh. The wool of his coat is damp and sodden as the rest of him, and Claire’s cold fingers catch against a particularly brittle patch of auburn as she works.

Her own hair becomes stringy and limp when left wet and unwashed for so long; Jamie’s tends to tangle horribly.

“I don’t know,” she whispers finally, as honest as she can make it. But Jamie only nods.

“Aye.” His voice is vulnerable in a way it has not been of late. She knows he feels responsible for the rest of them, in a complex way she has yet to fully unpack and understand. There was once a time she thought she’d have their entire lives to understand it. That she’d _chosen_ to spend her entire life understanding it.

So she says, with deliberation: “I’m glad I married you, you know.”

He looks up at her, apparently startled at this declaration. Claire does not react, but continues her careful excavation through the mop of his hair. Slowly, the strands separate and feel softer under her fingers, allowed to fall into a listless shadow of their usual cheerful curl.

“So ye dinna regret any of it, then,” Jamie says. It is half a tease -- dear man -- but carrying a thread of something more serious underneath. 

“I believe that is a question better asked of you, my lad.” 

She doesn’t stop her detangling, but she does keep a careful eye on the silver burnish of her ring, bobbing up and down as her sure fingers work through the tangles. 

Jamie laughs, so brightly that it brings a lump to her throat. 

“You ken fine I dreamt of marryin’ ye from likely the second moment we met, Claire.”

“And here I thought you were being selfless.” Twist, segment, comb through, repeat. There is a particularly stubborn knot at the base of his skull that she is debating simply snipping off.

Her own hair, knotted at the back of her head, is disastrous enough that the mere thought of unpinning it feels akin to an advanced experience of ringworm.

“I loved ye when I married ye and I love ye now, Sassenach, and God kens I shall love ye when we’re auld loons an’ all this hair ye’re fightin’ with is white as ash.”

Claire takes a deep breath. She is seized by the impulse to count every lash on his eyelids, every hair on his head. She can hear the continued torrent of the rain outside, and thinks now that it might be hiding them away from the world, and everything in it. She says,

“I know you did. Love me, I mean.”

She can’t see his face, but she can feel his smile shift a little, solidify. 

“Good,” he says.

“There’s a bit at the back I need to cut.” This is said more for something to do than because it is really pertinent. She does not want to begin crying. If she does, then perhaps she will never stop. 

“Hmph,” he says.

“But I haven’t any sheers.”

“Ye could use my dirk?”

“ _Absolutely_ not.” 

“Ye didna answer my question, then,” he says, still with that blue-eyed tease, exhausted but summer-like. It is the dead of winter; even Jamie, whose person she is convinced is the predecessor to the modern furnace, has cold fingers right now.

“What,” says Claire. _Twist, segment, comb through, repeat._

“D’ye regret any of it?”

She hovers for a bit, working in silence. The room is musty and has no fireplace, and she is itchy and achy under her clothes. But she doesn’t want to stop.

When she speaks, she is not entirely sure what makes her say it. 

“Yes.” 

“... Oh, aye?”

Something in her heart twists at the renewed vulnerability in his voice. She hurries to continue.

“I’d go back,” she says. _Twist, segment, comb through --_ “To that day I married you. And I’d -- I’d do it again. So that -- you’d know that you were marrying someone who loved you, too.”

Her practiced hands find his bangs and she starts fiddling with them, brushing a few strands to the side and swiping at another, mostly aimless. When she brings the comb up for a final time, his fingers close around her wrist with impossible gentleness. 

She sets the brush down on the bed, allowing herself to be pulled around to face him. 

“ _Mo chridhe_ ,” he whispers, nearly inaudible.

Jamie is not one to cry easily -- for all that he feels more deeply and broadly than she will ever be able to, he sheds his tears selectively, importantly. So they’re not _there_ , entirely. But she can feel them, in a place in her heart that counts more than something one sees with eyes.

He’s silent for a moment, just looking at her, too long for it to be accidental. 

“Jamie,” she starts. 

“Do ye ken, Claire, I -- I think I did.”

She’s already shaking her head, hands coming up to bracket his face with the impulsive movement of habitual care. “You don’t have to --”

“No -- listen.” His hand, so much larger than hers, cups over her knuckles. “ _Mo nighean donn_. I say yer my heart, Claire, but -- ye ken yer soul an’ mine -- they arena physical things. I dinna think. And time seems much like a physical thing. So I cannae help but feel that -- my spirit _kens_ yours, the -- the _truth_ of it, Claire, and that doesna have anythin’ tae do with what point in time ye told me ye loved me.”

She thinks back to that early morning by the river, when he held her and spoke so seriously of the plight of women. Absurdly, she wants to laugh -- at the philosophy thick in his voice, at his earnestness, at the way he is still _himself_ amidst all of this. 

“Is that so?” she says, voice warbling despite herself.

“Now, before, forever -- even when we die, God’ll ken I love ye, and you me, and -- and us, each other. Do ye not think it so?” 

He sounds so serious she cannot help but listen and absorb, like the honesty of his words is making its home somewhere intangible in her limbs. She weighs them, turns them over. His eyes are wide and blue and look up at her, his face cradled between her hands. His cheeks are cold, under her fingertips.

History is threatening to tear them apart, and she never wants to let him go.

“Alright,” she says, finally. “Alright. So you know.”

Her husband smiles. It’s tired, but warm in the cold _everything else_ ; secret-like. Just theirs. 

“I do,” he says. 

“ _Good_ ,” she echoes. 

The rain continues outside in an unrelenting howl. He takes her hand between his, the ring he gave her safe under his rough palms, and he says, “Come. I’ll help ye get out of yer wet things for bed.”

Hand still tangled between his, she lets him.

**Author's Note:**

> Bí cúramach -- "be careful"


End file.
